Up From the Blue (11 page)

While you could bounce a quarter off of Phil’s bed, I refused to make that extra effort. When there was something heavy to
carry, I whined that I couldn’t lift it without his help. In the kitchen, I hid dirty silverware under sponges, in the garbage disposal, in a box of cereal—anything to get the chore crossed off my list. I couldn’t—wouldn’t—keep track of the rules, or agree to something I didn’t want to do.

All that summer, we made the trip to work with him, driving along the Potomac—the suburbs on one side, D.C. on the other—learning the names of the bridges and landmarks, and finally reaching the Pentagon. The beige building with its huge parking lot was nothing like the marvelous five-sided donut Dad had drawn because you never saw it from the air.

Inside, we’d walk through the cement hallways, as men in uniform nodded and saluted and checked ID cards. Everyone there walked so tall, as if they had poles running through the backs of their jackets. They seemed amused to see a girl in the building, though Phil assured me they were laughing at my hair, which was so knotted I could only brush the top layer.

I’d slouch beside Dad as he and his colleagues talked of atomic clocks and spread spectrum radio signals, geostationary orbits and satellites. Listening to these conversations made me itch—first inside my sock, then behind my knee, my nose, under the sock again.

“Tillie, stand still,” he would tell me.

Phil, of course, stood perfectly still, eyes on whoever was speaking.

Sometimes I interrupted these men to tell them that I missed our old house, making Dad and Phil nervous, as if I might mention Momma at any moment. I never did. This was a habit as ingrained in me as brushing my teeth in the morning. I had not even considered telling them about Momma. What I wanted, what I needed, was sympathy. Instead, these men, with all their
colored bars and fancy pins, recited the many places they’d lived and how it made them more worldly and made their lives more exciting. It is a military brat’s life to uproot and readjust, they told me. It would build my character. And while I did not appreciate all of this at eight years old, I would later.

Dad’s way of keeping me quiet was to reach into his pocket and give us two quarters. Phil and I would wander the hallways and eventually end up at the snack bar, where we bought powdered donuts.

Toward the end of the summer, Dad led us past the soldier who guarded the room containing the giant computers. The whole room rumbled as the machines pumped out pale yellow cards punched with small squares and reams of paper covered in numbers. He said we could watch how the machines worked as long as we didn’t touch.

Sitting with our backs against the wall, Phil passed me a donut, and I licked off the powder, setting the rest down on the wrapper. We weren’t supposed to eat in the computer room, but the door was closed and there was no way to hear the crinkling of the package over the noise of the machines.

“Do you think she’s coming back?” I asked.

“Don’t keep asking me about Mom.”

“I miss her.”

“I don’t.”

Phil was sturdy in ways I never tried to be. When Momma disappeared, he did not ask for her, did not search for her or cry under his covers at night. He took in the facts—that there were new chores to divide between us, there would be no one home after school, and we were old enough to tuck ourselves in at night.

“You’re saying you’re happy?”

He crinkled his nose, as if to say,
What’s that got to do with anything?

I licked the powder off another donut and Phil mouthed,
Quit that
, but he wouldn’t fight with me. Dad said the Pentagon was not a place to act like children.

“Tillie?” The door opened slowly, and I recognized her before she was sure she’d recognized me. It was Anne, wearing her fitted blue air force blazer with a short matching skirt. “Well, look at you two here, doing important work like your father,” she said.

When she approached, I felt my face flush and strained to keep my lower lip from quivering. She reached out to hug me, and I collapsed in her arms, needy and ashamed. I didn’t even like Anne, but seeing her was a crushing reminder of how certain I’d been on the airplane that I was on my way to see Momma.

“I know. I know,” she said.

What could she possibly know? I pulled away and stood, shaking with grief and rage, amid the rumbling machines.

“That’s right. Wipe the tears.”

“Why are you here?” I asked.

“I still work for your father, dear,” she said. “It’s just taken some time to make the move.”

Anne picked up the donuts and wrappers, sliding straight down because her skirt was too short for bending over.

Turning to Phil, she said, “It’s good to see you, soldier.”

I could see what it was in Phil that made people say these kinds of things. There was something about his face and his posture, despite the chubby cheeks and being one of the shortest in his grade, that made you forget he was a child.

“Well,” she said, “I’m sure we’ll be seeing more of each other. And I know I won’t find you eating in this room again.”

I thought of violins, Walter’s cigarette, her dumb dancing. I thought of how much my life had changed during that time, while I didn’t even know it was happening.

MY FATHER TRIED HIS
best to distract us from Momma’s absence. There were evenings with board games like Clue and Pop-O-Matic Trouble, hikes into the woods, and picnics with his well-decorated colleagues, who carefully neglected to ask about our mother. Once we even camped out in our backyard, which was crowded with oaks, deep ivy, and a swimming pool—drained long before we moved in—with its blue-painted cement and a large crack running along the bottom. The only time there was water in it was after a storm.

We pitched the tent with the zippered door facing away from the pool so we wouldn’t accidentally fall in if we had to pee in the dark. And in a small pit of dirt surrounded by rocks, Dad built a fire where we roasted hot dogs and then used the same sticks to roast marshmallows. I helped Dad dig up sassafras roots, which we handed to Phil, who shaved the tough outer skin off the root with his pocketknife. A pot of water was already heating up over the fire, and we’d take those roots and cook them down into tea.

“Anyone have a Band-Aid?” Phil asked. He’d nicked his thumb and held it up to show off the blood.

“How badly does it hurt?” Dad asked, and I knew Phil had been caught being a sissy. “Do you think you cut into a vein or an artery?”

Phil shook his head no and wiped the blood on his jeans.

“Okay,” Dad said. “If you
do
need a Band-Aid, you’re welcome to go inside and get yourself one.”

Phil went back to work at another root, stripping off the leaves, and I asked what seemed to be the obvious question. “When can
I
get a pocketknife?”

Over a fire surrounded by stones, we made the most fragrant red tea, drinking even the bits of mud that had come off the roots and sunk to the bottom of our cups.

At bedtime, Dad lit the two-mantle gas lantern, the sound like a low and steady gust of wind that filled the tent. He checked my hair for ticks, combing his fingers along my scalp, while I giggled and covered my head with my hands to stop him from tickling. Dad pulled my hands back down to my sides, inspecting again, slowing down whenever he found a scab or debris from our day under the trees. In the end, he did find one tick. He used the tweezers from his pocketknife to remove it, before burning its body with a match.

“Time for bed,” he said. “Off you go.”

I crawled into my sleeping bag and lay there in the humid, buggy air, thinking of pearl-handled pocketknives and other wants that might fill me. Dad, glowing beside the lantern, took out his work papers.

“You have to work
now
?” I asked, lifting my head off the pillow.

“Go to sleep.”

“What are you working on?”

“I’m looking at some test results from one of our Timation satellites. Checking for errors.”

“You don’t like mistakes,” I laughed.

“There can’t be any,” he said, perfectly serious. “We’re making something that has to operate all by itself, and for a very long time. There’s no room for error.”

I put my head back on the pillow and listened to the scratch of his pen, and then beyond it, into the quiet. When I was still, sometimes I heard it: the sound of Momma singing, and her bracelets clacking against the edge of the pan.

Where is she? Is she okay? When is she coming back? Can we visit her?
These were the questions I learned to keep to myself. Though I stopped speaking about Momma, some corner of my mind was always full of these thoughts. I often stood on the lawn, trying to think of the questions that would lead to the right answers.

Up and down the street, neighborhood kids loaded into cars with colorful towels and goggles—off to their last days of summer camp. I walked past them, invisible, until one Sunday I met a girl about my age jumping rope at the end of the cul-de-sac. She was not pretty, but she was extremely tidy in her white button-up and plaid miniskirt, her hair shiny and so short in back that most of her neck showed. She looked like Velma from Phil’s old Scooby Doo lunch box. As she jumped, she chanted a rhyme about Cinderella, and when she tripped on the rope, she stared at me as if I’d tripped her.

“What?” she demanded.

“I’m just standing here.”

“Be nice, Hope.” Her father had come outside, and he put his hand out to shake. “You’re the girl who just moved in.”

“We’ve been here a while.”

“Well, then,” he said, “I’m sure you and Hope can play together.”

“But Dad!”

“I’m sure you’ll have a fine time playing with …”

“Tillie,” I said.

“With Tillie,” her dad said. “And you need to change out of that uniform. You’re not allowed to wear it until school starts.”

“Yes, sir,” she said, glaring at him. Then turning to me with a shrug, she asked, “Do you like pickles?”

“If they’re sour.”

I picked up her rope and let it drag behind me as I followed her inside, where we ate an entire jar of pickles, then drank the juice. “What grade are you going into?” she asked.

“Third.”

“I’m fourth.”

“Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“A brother.”

“I’m an only. Which branch is your dad in?”

“Air force.”

“Army. What does your mom do?”

I learned from Dad that the easiest way to avoid a question was not to speak at all.

“Uh-oh. Something you can’t say? Is that why you’re looking so strange?”

There was a lot of shrugging.

I also learned from Dad that if you
must
speak, you could say true and interesting things that didn’t actually answer the question. For instance, someone would ask, “Where’s your wife?” and he’d describe her hobby of making dolls.

“My mother has orange hair,” I finally said. “And a crooked lip on one side where a kitten scratched her. And she’s very skinny if she turns sideways but not as skinny if you see her from the front. She’s a good singer. She’s a good dancer, too, and always wanted my dad to dance with her, but he never would.”

“Are you ever going to let go of my jump rope?”

I didn’t notice I was still holding it, and I let it drop. She laughed a little and then I did. I laughed much louder and longer than I wanted to. It had been a long time since I thought anything was funny.

“Can I come tomorrow?” I asked.

“I’m only here on weekends.”

“Why?”

“My parents are divorced. What do you think?”

And she filled me in on the shouting, the silent treatments, and the one-handed lady who drank with her father all afternoon in the living room and stood behind him with her hands (one being only a wrist, really) in his front pockets. She told me about having to sit on the couch for
the announcement
and how her parents remained standing, and the weird smile on her father’s face as he packed, like he’d been released from jail. The worst, she said, was how her mother now stared into the mirror, saying she was too old and too fat for anyone to love her again, and after dinners she vomited up her food because somehow that would make her beautiful.

“Oh,” I said.

“I just assumed your parents were divorced, too, because I’ve never seen your mother.”

I told her then. I told her the secrets I’d never told a soul—how Momma would lie on the floor outside my old room crying, and how sometimes I’d sit by her and stroke her hair, or touch the diamond on her ring, wondering if she knew I was there.

I told her how she disappeared. “She was in the car when they came here with the U-Haul,” I said. “And then there was a fight—my brother heard it—and I haven’t seen her, and my
dad won’t tell us where she is. He says we should stop asking. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this.”

Hope stood there with her mouth open. Finally, I’d interested her. She ran to get a notebook and, reminding me of Velma again, said, “I’ll write down the clues.”

I hadn’t meant to tell the family secrets, but once I did, it felt like I had loosened something that had been strapped tight across my chest. And now this complete stranger was going to help me find her.